


crystalline hindsight

by lethandralis



Series: like an infection gone septic; part of his blood [3]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Depression, Gen, death talk, i love to write sad things and suffer, sad brotherly feelings jam on a roof, vague medical stuff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-16
Updated: 2016-10-16
Packaged: 2018-08-22 16:18:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,380
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8292281
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lethandralis/pseuds/lethandralis
Summary: hanzo keeps a sparrow feather on his bedside table, a reminder. they both wear the same wave-patterned scarf, a gift from their mother one year when they were still young.





	

“How much of you is real?” says Hanzo.

The conversation starts after dinner one night. It is their night to clean up, and the kitchen at the Watchpoint is empty save for them. They converse back and forth in low Japanese, easy small-talk, as they usually do. Filling the air with words, as the younger Shimada is wont to do.

“Later,” says Genji, as he wipes down a stretch of countertop. Hanzo doesn’t push it. He returns to loading the dishwasher.

Hanzo has been an official Overwatch agent for four months now, and the transition has been about as smooth as anyone might expect. He is a valuable addition to the team, a sharp tactial mind, a brilliant sniper. He rolls seamlessly into combat simulations. Hanzo slots himself into the open place in the Overwatch roster and settles in comfortably.

But his brother is _alive_ , a fact that he frequently has trouble reconciling. Genji had caught him on his yearly pilgrimage to their family’s compound, had informed him about the Overwatch recall, and then had disappeared into the blackening night. The evening had been a haze of confusion and tight throats and adrenaline; sometimes Hanzo looks back on it even know and doubts if it was real. Two weeks of confusing phone calls and sleepless plane rides had led him here, to Gibraltar, to a ragtag bunch of heroes who were all, technically, criminals by virtue of being here.

Genji doesn’t seem to mind. He converses effortlessly with everyone he encounters. Everyone, it seems, is his best friend. He complains none about the dusty hallways, the flimsy foam mattresses, the grueling hours of training they do in preparation for every mission. Genji Shimada is every bit as jubilant as he was the day he died.

Were it not for the synthetic suit of armor his brother wears, the world might not know his brother ever died.

But the world, and Hanzo in particular _does_ know, with a terrible and brutal intensity that he still cannot shake. He remembers with sickening clarity watching his brother fall, a final and hollow _thunk_ on the wooden floor. Hanzo had gone down second, toppling over sideways like a cardboard box in a hurricane.

They’d carried Hanzo out on a stretcher, first. He was unconscious by the time he reached the ambulance.

Three days after the first conversation in the kitchen they find themselves sitting on the roof of a supply room, overlooking the sea. Hanzo has brought sake, the kind they can only really find back home, snagged on a mission to Hanamura last week. He’s been saving it for some time now. For the right occasion.

Genji doesn’t touch it, a fact that makes Hanzo’s stomach twist.

“You asked how much of me was real?” asks Genji, fiddling idly with his knife. He’s taken his mask off, something that he’s taken to doing around the Watchpoint. Hanzo feels the need to avoid eye contact.

“I did.”

“All of me is _real_ , because all of me exists. But I’m sure that’s not what you meant.” He throws his knife several inches in the air and catches it without flinching. He draws out a long, slow breath. “I died, you know.”

Hanzo nods, downing a swig of sake.

“Angela was in contact with hospitals in Japan, and I guess she thought I was an interesting specimen, because she flew out to Hanamura and began reconstruction.”

“Reconstruction?”

“Necromancy, maybe?” Genji laughs, leaning back on the heels of his hands. “She had to figure out how to make me not dead. She won’t talk to me about it much, and it’s probably all too much medical jargon for me to really get, anyway. I remember waking up probably… four days after I died? Everything hurt. I was hooked up to a lot of machines; I don’t remember what all of them did, but they were very annoying. Angela introduced herself, told me that she wanted to figure out how to get me living again, in exchange for my unique services to Overwatch.”

“Dr. Zeigler is an amazing physician,” says Hanzo, tone level. He screws the cap back onto his sake and sets it aside.

“She asked me if I wanted to. If it was okay with me. It was a business deal at the heart of it, but I told her that it was fine and she… ran with it, I guess. I don’t remember much of the process. I was in a medically induced coma for most of it. The parts that I _do_ remember aren’t… good. Lots of hurting, lots of trying to figure out how to make what was left of me into something useful. I was in physical therapy for a while.”

There is a long silence. A decade and a half ago, Genji would have reached for the flask of sake, would have taken a long, slow drink of it, reveling in the burn. Instead, he sheathes his knife and draws one knee up to his chin.

“But you asked how much of me is real?”

“Yes.”

“Well. The head, obviously, and parts of the torso. The heart and lungs had to be replaced; they’re copies, now, basically, but with less holes in them and made primarily out of plastic.” Genji’s tone, usually bouncy and effervescent in his native language, is robotic. Stale. Like rehearsing a grocery list. “I have a stomach but it’s so inefficient that I don’t need to use it if I don’t want to. Angela has it set up so that I receive daily infusions of proteins, carbohydrates, water, salt, and other various nutrients, plus a coolant mixture and a biofuel for the electronics. Sort of like an IV drip, but too viscous to go into actual blood vessels. The left leg is mostly mine, the right leg stops just below the hip joint. The right arm was a complete loss, I’m told, but it means I can do this.” He flexes his hand and a set of three shuriken slide in-between his fingers. He rolls it up at the wrist and they slide back in. “The left arm is almost intact, but Angela stripped off most of the flesh and muscle from pretty much everything in order to replace it with replicas that are less easily damaged. That way, I don’t have chunks that need replacement faster than others.”

Hanzo, for the first time since they sat down, looks at his brother. Stares at him, cold grey eyes nigh unreadable.

Genji reaches behind his head. “Oh, and the scarf is mine, but you knew that.”

“Do you regret it?”

Genji frowns, staring back out at the sea. The sun is down, now, and the lights of the Watchpoint bounce off the water, a peaceful, wobbly reflection. He considers this, turns the statement over in his head. Recalls the past ten years of learning to use a body that was never his to begin with.

“I used to. While I was recovering, and learning to use my body, I regretted it almost daily. But I didn’t dare tell Angela. All the work she put into me…” He wiggles the fingers of his left hand. “I couldn’t let that go to waste.”

“But time went on. I got used to Overwatch, and I made friends, and I helped people. It got better.” Far off, someone whoops and someone else laughs. They are having karaoke night in the lounge. Genji is missing it for the first time in five months.

“Those aren’t your legs, are they?” Asks Genji, tapping Hanzo’s shin with his toe, a soft, metallic _clink_. Metal on metal, inorganic on inorganic.

Hanzo shakes his head. “No.” He reaches down, presses on two switches underneath the knee plating on his right leg, and slides off the entire prosthesis with a smooth, hydraulic _shhh_. “I lost them to you. I figured it was fair.” He hands the leg to his brother, anticipating his desire to inspect it. Genji takes it delicately, rolls the ankle joint, taps the smooth expanses of metal. His gaze is interested, admiring, as though he is appreciating some fine art hanging in a museum.

“Well, they look sleek,” Genji replies, finally, handing the leg back to Hanzo, who puts it back on without responding. “Must have been expensive.”

“The clan payed for them. They had them custom made for me, made so that I could fight and climb better than I could before I lost my legs. Once I had healed enough to walk, I left,” Hanzo says, frankly. “The doctor released me and I got on a train and never came back.”

“Well, not _never_ ,” chimes Genji, tone light but with an underpainting of solemnity. Neither of them needs to mention it: the offerings, the yearly pilgrimages, the prayers. Hanzo keeps a sparrow feather on his bedside table, a reminder. They both wear the same wave-patterned scarf, a gift from their mother one year when they were still young.

They sit in silence for a while, one next to the other, watching the waves roll in.

“Was it your idea?” Genji asks, nearly too quiet to hear.

Hanzo sighs out a lungful air, as though something invisible has knocked the air out of his chest. “No.”

“Then why?”

There are lots of reasons. Hanzo remembers, still clear as crystal, the meetings they conducted. In secret, far off from Hanamura, while Genji was off socializing, disgracing the Shimada family name with his playboy ways.

While Genji was off being twenty-four and happy.

“The clan – father, everyone, but mostly father – decided that you were not going in the direction that was best.”

Genji breathes out a chuckle. “I already knew that. I’ve known that since I was fifteen.”

Hanzo furrows his brows. “What?”

“Oh, come _on_ , Hanzo, you can’t really believe I’m that stupid. You saw the ways our father looked at me just as much as I did. I wasn’t you. I wasn’t stoic, or brave, I couldn’t lead people. I was useless with a gun ‘til I was twenty, you know that.”

Hanzo considers this for a moment. His brother has never been him; they looked well enough alike, but their personalities were night-and-day from the beginning. Their mother told them stories of the two of them as children. Hanzo, at four, curled up in a corner with a stack of books as his toddling two-year-old brother swung around a foam sword, knocking books off shelves and giggling with delight. Genji, at seven, begging with tears in his eyes for permission to join a local children’s acting troupe. Hanzo, at twelve, competing in their school’s geography bee and winning.

Polar opposites.

“I know.”

“Then what was it?”

Hanzo bristles. “Why do you want to know? It isn’t good.”

Genji leans back, stretching out his legs. “How long has it been? Ten years? I’ve spent ten years wondering why my own brother killed me. I can only piece together so much, Hanzo. I can’t read your mind. You’re the only one who can tell me.” His tone is brutally soft, demanding and intense without volume or force.

Quietly, Hanzo groans, but he agrees. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

Someone down in the Watchpoint laughs, low and rumbling. Somebody else shrieks.

“We met about it three times, at the secondary compound. While you were away. Father was sure you wouldn’t even notice. He said to us that you were a problem. He had tried everything he knew on you, to try to make you into what he wanted, but none of it really stuck. You remember. He spent a long time lecturing you, yeah?” Genji nods affirmative. “He said you were too stubborn, too vacant-headed, too wrapped up in your playboy aspirations to be of any use to the clan.

By that time Father said he already knew he wanted me to lead once he got too old. He was already training me for it. I’m sure you knew that.” Genji nods again, eyes downcast, staring at the ships bobbing on the water far below.

“Sometimes I wondered if I was born into the wrong family,” Genji says, so soft that it might be to himself.

Hanzo swallows hard. “I tried to fight him on it. Asked if we could just send you off, let you go unharmed. We could talk to you, we could make an arrangement. But he was dead-firm. He wanted you gone. If it was on a stretcher or in a body bag, he didn’t really care.”

“That would have been easy. He knew where I was, he could have had someone kill me in no time flat.” He mimes a gun being fired. “ _Bang_ , easy.”

Hanzo shakes his head. “No. He wanted me to do it. Said that by defending you I was going soft, and I needed to be shown what it meant to be a leader of the clan.” He drops his voice even lower. “ _If you’re going to be in charge when I’m gone, you’ve got to do it right. You can’t be afraid to kill people, Hanzo, even if they’re family._ I had to agree. I didn’t know what else to do. I think it was as much a punishment and a warning for me as it was for you, although much worse for you.

“I tried to talk to you because I thought I might be able to convince you to leave. If you left, maybe you could flee somewhere safe. Somewhere that I wouldn’t have to kill you, or watch you die.”

Genji considers this for a moment, lets it roll around in his brain. “I didn’t understand. I thought you were messing with me, at first. I thought you were just trying to play leader. But you were armed.”

Hanzo nods. “I didn’t want to be.”

“But you were.”

“Yes.”

Silence dominates for several minutes. Hanzo attempts to swallow down the growing knot in his throat with another mouthful of sake, but fails. Genji unsheathes his knife again, tests the edge against his metallic fingers, makes the blade hiss and spark in his hand.

“Father had died by then,” adds Genji, still fiddling with his blade. “What had it been, three months or so? Not long.”

“He had. The plans were in place before he passed. I tried to talk everyone else down from it after his funeral, but it… didn’t go well. I felt obligated. It was made clear to me that if I did not confront you, I would be killed for my insubordination.”

Genji tilts his head at his brother. “Insubordination? You were in charge. You could do whatever you wanted.”

“Nobody wants a leader who steps into power and immediately pardons the black sheep.” Hanzo is staring at his feet, shoulders slumped, voice low. Hardly the image of royalty he’s built himself up to be. Genji wonders what he and his brother might look like if they had been born common men.

“And what about _you_? Did you want it?”

Hanzo breathes a sigh. “Of course I didn’t fucking _want_ it, Genji. I’m a monster, sure, but I’m not quite so cruel.” He tries and fails to turn his tone acerbic, instead falling into a defeated monotone.

Silence, again, heavy and cold and impersonal. Hanzo considers his bottle of sake but leaves it where it sits behind him. It’s coming back to them both, in their own separate pieces. There’s no need to discuss it; there’s nothing here that needs dug up further. Hanzo, twenty-seven years old, approaching his brother with hands raised, a blade up his sleeve and his sword of choice underneath a bench ten feet away.

 _We need to talk, Genji,_ he’d said. _Sit?_

Genji had frowned at him, arms crossed, shoulders spread apart. The image of a man already defending himself, already standing his ground against a threat he has not yet seen. _I’ll stand._

Hanzo had sighed, steeling himself, trying to gather from the annals of his soul every ounce of reserve he could muster. _We need to talk about_ you _, and about the way you’re handling your place in the family. It was acceptable, years ago, for you to be out partying at all hours of the day. It was acceptable for you to shirk your responsibilities and your duties in favor of pleasure. But you are older. We are both older. It is time to grow up._

 _And, what, accept my fate as a criminal? Die of a gunshot wound lying in a gutter somewhere? Or locked up in a jail cell? I don’t fucking think so,_ brother _. If you want that life for yourself, sure, but why force it on me?_

Hanzo kept trying. Compromises were shot down, insults were spat, threats were delivered and then made good upon. Hanzo had tried the blade up his sleeve, first, found that his brother was equally armed, and dove for his sword. The first strike was not a killing blow. It could have been.

By the time Hanzo could signal to the compound’s security that it was done, he could no longer stand.

Genji is the first to shake himself from the vicegrip of memory. He’s been through these motions before. This set of memories is so familiar to him that he can rehearse them frame-by-frame, in any order, at any time.

Hanzo shudders out a breath through his teeth. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, anija.”

Genji is not looking at his brother, but he can hear his breath shaking, his voice breaking.

“Why did you bring me here?”

Genji lets the question hang in the air for a few minutes, considering. The recall had set into motion his decision to confront his brother at their former home, but for years prior he had wanted to see Hanzo. For closure, to ask what happened, to see if he was even still alive. The recall of Overwatch had seemed like as good an excuse as any to finally bridge the gap.

It was not the first time he had found his brother on his yearly vigil at the Shimada family compound. Their confrontation had, in fact, been his third sighting of his brother, but every previous time he had found himself terrified to make his presence known. He’d watched from afar, perched in the rafters, far out of sight. Weighing his options, wondering if this would be the year to speak.

“I thought that Overwatch might be good for you. It’s not a perfect organization by any means, but it would give you something to do. A cause to serve. It’s done a lot for me.” He recalls, privately, a long conversation with Winston and Angela about the possibility of signing his brother, the murderer, on as an Overwatch agent. It had not gone well.

Hanzo does not respond. He stares out at the rolling sea. A cluster of small sailboats is coming in to the shore for the night; he watches them as they bob on the water, looking small enough to take up in his hand and crush.

“And I missed you. I spent a long time working through… what happened, and you’re still my big brother. I missed having someone to pester.”

Hanzo almost laughs, tries to, but it comes out as a choked, choppy sound. “You were always good at that.” His voice is tight.

Genji titters with laughter. “It’s my most valued skill! I ought to have it on my resume: ‘ _Genji Shimada, expert obnoxious little brother_ ’.”

The tension breaks. Hanzo laughs, genuinely, wiping at his under-eyes with the heels of his hands. Genji smiles, a tired gesture with genuine eyes.

The brothers sit in silence for a while as the sun finishes its decent towards the horizon. Karaoke night has concluded; someone on the comms is asking if anyone has seen their phone, and someone else is trying to muffle their own laughter. Athena chimes out back at them: _It is getting late, agents,_ she says in all of their ears at once, _and you are all scheduled for a training simulation early tomorrow._ Out on the water, a seagull squawks; three more squawk back in reply. Hanzo’s breathing slows to a slow, even pace.

“Did I tell you what you needed to know?” asks Genji, eventually.

“Yes, you did. Thank you.”

**Author's Note:**

> hoo! a finished series! nice!  
> the time since i've published fractured soul and this implies that i'm fast at writing things, which i think is funny. (i'm not fast at writing things. i wrote almost all of this before fractured soul even existed.)  
> i wanna thank the folks who hang out on the mchanzo discord server, particularly @GuoBia (derpymcbuttface here on ao3) for beta-ing and encouraging me to actually finish this.  
> i promise i will write something happy now. i have like five works in progress. please kill me.  
> in the meantime, come visit me other places!  
> [tumblr](http://lethandral1s.tumblr.com) || [twitter](http://twitter.com/lethandralis)


End file.
